Character Design Project – Post Mortem

After 6 weeks, the character design project is finally complete and it has been a great first time experience creating a 3D character from concept and bringing it to life in 3D. Many personal lessons were learnt on this journey, but the best part was learning them with a group of great like minded individuals who all laughed with each others failures and helped each other to overcome the challenges. So as a group we each had to create a 3D character in the style of a cartoon series of which Gravity Falls was ours.

What Went Right:

Team Chemistry: The group was great right from the start. We worked well with each other making group decisions easily and best of all we were open with each other. We had various issues throughout the project where some individuals could do something differently or better, like me with my original character concept. We spoke openly to each other giving feedback and constructive criticism which was taken on board and made the final product better for it.

Vertical Slice: Fortunately we came up with a manageable game plan right from the start and stuck to it. None of us came up with overly ambitious characters and we iterated upon our designs very early on eliminating the need for any last minute crunches. Adding to this after speaking to some of the members and reading their post-mortems it’s clear that most of us ran into the same problems during the texturing, modelling and rigging phase as most of us were relatively new to some aspects. But because our vertical slice was manageable we were able to help each other to overcome our issues within a good time frame. I would say this is a very fickle thing to get right with every project given the nature of creative work but I believe our actions in iterating early is what would better enable this for future projects.

What Went Wrong:

Team Collaboration: To be honest I don’t really see this as something that went wrong but more something that can be improved for next time. So early on and in the later stages of the project we were a great team that was communicating and working well together, but during the core of the project phase we simply became recluses. Part of the blame lies on the Rapid project that was in its crunch phase so most of us were forced to focus more on that, but never the less we should’ve maintained our collaboration on Slack and kept sharing our WIPs(Work In Progress) to gain feedback. This most likely would’ve aided in finishing the project earlier then we did which would’ve allowed for even better quality in our models.

In summary, this was an exciting project working with some good peeps. We all learnt a lot about the pipeline and processes of 3D character creation and also where we can each improve. For me personally my character did not live up to my expectations but instead of being deflated I’m determined to push myself further which is a great feeling. This project not only brought some interesting 3D characters together but also some real-life ones too.